Marketing Mini Course

Step 2: Figure out how to capture leads.​

Percentages of people in the marketplace

Today's topic focuses on how you can start creating leads for your business. As a general strategy, you want to think of online marketing as farming rather than hunting. Most small business owners go out into the world looking for people who want to hire them immediately instead of looking for people who might be interested in what they have to offer eventually.

At any given point, only 3% of people you’ll come across will be ready to “Buy Now,” whereas 6-7% will be looking to buy in the next few months, or are “open to it” if they find a great deal. Another 30% are “not thinking about it,” and the next 30% “don't think they're interested.” Finally, the last 30% "know they're not interested,” meaning they have a brother who does it for free or they will just never have a need for it.

What if, instead of looking for just the 3% who are buying now (which most marketers do), you started planting seeds by capturing the contact information of a much larger market segment (and possibly even the people who “know they're not interested”)? You can slowly send them convincing emails that show why what you’ve got to offer is so valuable, and eventually all these people will think of you when they’re finally ready to buy.

Your giveaway is essentially the offer that makes people raise their hand and say, "I might be interested someday!"

Email marketing is your best friend.

This whole process can be automated using email marketing campaigns.

Email campaigns are generally considered better than social media because you “own” your list instead of being bound to social media channels that might change or go out of popularity like MySpace. Did you know that Facebook originally let you send out a mass message to everyone who "liked" your page? Then suddenly they changed their rules and now charge you to do that.

Email marketing has been proven time and again to be the most effective form of online marketing, so our goal today is twofold:

Figure out what to give away in exchange for an email address.

Figure out what online tool you’ll use to allow people to submit their email address.

What can you give away to get email addresses?

Here are a few ideas to get you started:

You can give away a free report, free video, some sort of webinar or class, an email mini course, or essentially anything that is a broader scope of what you do for clients. So let's pretend you design websites for people. If that were the case, in a broader view of what you do, you essentially help people market themselves, correct? So how can you better help your clients who might be interested in marketing? What can you give them that would be of value to them, even if they don’t yet need a website?

Try to appeal to larger segment of the market, not just people who are in the "buying now" or "open to it" categories. For instance, if you wanted to give away a free report titled, "The Five Things to Look for When Hiring a Web Designer," you're only appealing to the top to categories of the pyramid.

On the other hand, if you create a report titled, "The Five Biggest Mistakes Small Business Owners Make," then you're appealing to a much larger audience. The report itself can become a selling tool by mentioning that one of the biggest mistakes is not having an effective website. And then in that section, you can discuss how to hire a web designer, and talk about the benefits of hiring you to design their website.

Remember, the goal is to just get their contact info so eventually when they are ready, they will think of you to for the service they need instead of someone else.​

Decide on the capturing tool you'll use.

Using squeeze pages and paid ads allows you to carefully measure everything.

Squeeze pages, landing pages, general signup buttons, popup menus... the list goes on and on. There are tons of way to actually capture the email addresses of prospects, but you decide on the primary one you'll use for your marketing campaign.

It's very important to have at least one paid media channel where your marketing actually costs you a fixed amount of money per month because you'll easily be able figure out your ROI (return on investment) and keep experimenting with real numbers until you find a model that works.

A few other strategies for capturing emails are putting a popup over your website (not one I recommend because it annoys people), creating a signup bar on the side of your website, using a blog and applying a technique called "content upgrade" where you incentivize people to download more in-depth content on a blog article (a very effective strategy), or simply posting an email signup link on your social media channel.

You can easily learn more about these methods by searching online, but the one I typically recommend is to create a squeeze page and then use paid ads to direct people to it. There are two primary reasons:

Using paid ads to direct people to a page is much more reliable than hoping people will stumble across your page using a blog or some other unpaid advertising (like posting comments in forums online). With paid ads, you know they are going to run and you can track exactly how many clicks and conversions you're getting.

Creating a squeeze page simplifies the decision making process down to a simple "yes" or "no." Instead of allowing your prospects to visit random pages on your website or blog and get distracted, you know they'll only be seeing what's on your squeeze page. This makes the testing phase easier because you'll only have one page to modify.

You're totally welcome to supplement your squeeze page and paid ads by having other signup links on your main site, but by far a simple squeeze page and paid ad is the starting point I'd recommend you follow.

​MARKETING ACTION STEP 3: Come up giveaway ideas.

Come up with 3-5 ideas of things you could give away for free to people who might eventually become clients. Remember, they must be things that are valuable to them. After coming up with the ideas, ask some of your current clients which idea they would be most likely to download if it were offered to them online for free.

​MARKETING ACTION STEP 4: Decide on your email capturing tool.

Come up with a general idea of how you’re going to get people to download your item. Are you going to create a squeeze page? Or are you going to create some sort of popup that shows over your website? I generally recommend creating a squeeze page, but the choice is yours.​

About Me

Martin Bentsen

Martin Bentsen, founder of Bentsen Breakthrough Consulting, has spoken numerous times at New York University, has run educational seminars at Actor's Connection on branding and marketing strategies for performers, and has written a 60 page informational book called Get Cast™, focusing on marketing tactics actors can use to find more consistent work. He is a member of both the National Association of Sales Professionals and Sales & Marketing Executives International, two highly acclaimed marketing organizations in the United States.

Martin graduated in 2011 with honors from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts' Film and Television program with a focus on directing and in 2010, he founded City Headshots®, which, according to Yelp, is ranked the top headshot studio in the United States. City Headshots currently employs seven people and has locations in New York, Denver, and Philadelphia. Some of City Headshots’ repeat clients include well known companies such as LinkedIn Corp, Facebook, American Express, and many of its photos have been featured in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.

As a business owner who has grown a photography business from zero to half a million dollars per year, Martin not only understands the intricacies of marketing and finding clients, but also what it takes for clients to successfully navigate the marketing world and make themselves memorable. He coaches small business owners one-on-one with their branding, marketing, and operational strategies, and in how they conduct themselves with actual clients.

Martin’s long term goal is to run major business seminars across the country while expanding his City Headshots brand to go international.